In Chinese, 听写/聽寫 (tīngxiě) literally means “listen [and] write”, or what in English would be called “dictation”. This is a common way to assess students’ ability to write Chinese characters by hand, both for native and non-native speakers.
Many people learning Chinese as adults aren’t used to this kind of test, and the unfamiliar script makes it even harder.
So how do you prepare for dictation tests?
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How to prepare for 听写/聽寫 (tīngxiě) tests
A commonly used method is to simply write the characters over and over until you know them.
This can work for a small number of characters, but becomes prohibitively inefficient in the long run. If you only want to pass one test and don’t care about forgetting everything after the test, repeatedly writing the characters is okay.
But that’s not what most learners want. And there is a better method!
In a nutshell, here’s what you should do:
- When you get the words for a dictation test, first make sure you understand the characters. What do they mean? How are they structured? What are the components? What functions do they have?
- Look up the correct stroke order, then write each character a few times to get familiar with it.
- Once you can write it with some flow, you should switch to active retrieval, meaning that you should not see the character as you write it.
- Spread out your reviews over time. Study other characters in between reviews, read something or simply go about your everyday activities.
- Before the test, practise from audio prompts in the same format as the test.
This method will enable you to nail every single dictation test, and you will also learn a lot about the Chinese writing system that will help you enormously further down the road.
Before looking at how to do this efficiently, though, we need to be clear about what a dictation test actually requires. If you know where things can go wrong, it becomes much easier to practise the right thing.
What can go wrong in a Chinese dictation test?
Dictation tests come in several forms. Your teacher might say a single word, put the target word in a sentence, give you a translation or other clue, or read a whole sentence aloud. You might have to write only the target word or everything you hear.
While these types of dictation are different, the core is the same: You need to understand what the teacher says, know which characters are used to write the words, and then be able to write those characters by hand.
Let’s have a look at what it takes to produce the right answer:
- Understand what the teacher says. For ordinary vocabulary dictation, this usually isn’t the main problem. You know which words are covered on the test and you normally get enough context to identify the right word. Sentence dictation is harder because it places greater demands on your listening comprehension. If listening itself causes problems, work on that separately; I’ve written more about hearing Mandarin sounds and tones, as well as a whole series about listening comprehension starting here: Beyond tīng bu dǒng, part 1: A guide to Chinese listening comprehension.
- Know which characters to use. Understanding a word does not automatically mean that you know which characters are used to write it. For example, in 工作 (gōngzuò), “to work”, the first character is 工, not 公 (also pronounced gōng), and the second character is 作, not 做 (also pronounced zuò). This is usually manageable for a weekly dictation test because you know which vocabulary is being tested, but if it causes trouble, make sure you understand the words and the component characters properly, as discussed in The building blocks of Chinese, part 5: Making sense of Chinese words.
- Know how to write the characters. For most beginners, this is the main challenge, and testing your ability to write by hand is usually the whole purpose of having a dictation test in the first place. For this reason, the rest of this article focuses mainly on learning and remembering how to write the characters.
Before we move on, I want to point out that, as a teacher, I’m not a big fan of dictation as a vocabulary test. It’s time-consuming and puts an unreasonable focus on handwriting. In addition, if a student is unable to produce the right written characters, you don’t know if it’s because they couldn’t understand what you said, were unable to pick the right character or failed to recall how to write it.
Decide how well you actually need to do on the 听写/聽寫 (tīngxiě)
Before spending hours making sure you know every character, decide what score you actually need on the test. Just because the course requires handwriting, it doesn’t mean that handwriting deserves a large share of your Chinese-learning time. I have discussed that broader question in more detail here. This article assumes that you need or want to do well on dictation; it does not assume that dictation is a particularly good use of your time.
If dictation mainly matters because your course requires it, aim for the result you need for the grade you want. If 80% is enough for your purposes, don’t spend extra hours getting to 100%. The closer to 100% you get, the more time it takes to eliminate each remaining potential error.
I find this difficult to follow myself. If I care about a subject, deliberately accepting a worse test result because my time would be better spent elsewhere feels wrong. In my first year of learning Chinese, I ended up spending most of my study time on vocabulary, which had serious consequences for my ability to communicate.
So, choose your target deliberately. The method described in this article can help you get everything right if that’s what you want, but that doesn’t mean 100% should always be the goal.
That being said, let’s go through the method in more detail.
Understand new characters before trying to memorise them
When you first encounter Chinese characters, they look like pictures, perhaps a bit like primitive emoticons. It’s important to understand that they are not pictures, though, and that by understanding how characters work, they become easier to learn and remember.
I have already written a guide for how to learn characters as a beginner, where I go into much more detail. For dictation preparation, start by making sense of the characters you need to learn.
Before writing a new character, look at its structure and, if it’s a compound, its components. What function do the components have? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should check the introduction to this series of articles on the building blocks of Chinese.
In an ideal world, all the information you need would be included in your textbook, app or whatever resource you use for learning Chinese. This is never the case, though.
Where to find the information you need to make sense of Chinese characters
To begin with, you need a basic understanding of how characters work. You can get the basics in the building blocks series, or you can check the character course I built for Skritter.
For information about specific characters, I strongly suggest checking out Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese characters or, if you prefer a free, web-based resource, then Zi.tools.
It’s worth noting that almost all other dictionaries don’t offer the kind of information you want and might contain incorrect or even outright misleading information about the structure of compounds or the role of the components in compounds.
Looking all this up may feel slow at first, but it soon becomes second nature. Once you know where to look, this should normally take less than a minute per character.
Write the character a few times to get a feel for it
Once you understand the character in theory, write it a few times to get familiar with it. Make sure you check the stroke order. It’s not essential that you remember the stroke order for every character, but it’s better to start writing it correctly than to try to fix it later.
Write the character until you can write it in one go without hesitation. The goal here is still not to memorise how to write it, just to get to know it a little bit. While you write, you can mentally review the information you learnt in the previous step.
Use a pen or pencil you like the feel of, and write on squared paper. I’ve collected stroke order resources and tools to generate grid paper here.
All the resources you need to learn and teach Chinese stroke order
Never copy Chinese characters stroke by stroke to memorise them
Writing a character while seeing a model character is good for basic penmanship (stroke order, stroke placement, relative size and position of components, and so on), but terrible for memorisation.
If your goal is to remember how to write a character, never copy it stroke by stroke while looking at a model. This requires no active recall at all.
Instead, hide the model and write the character from memory. If you can’t do it with the whole character, then write it with as few sneak peeks as possible.
This is better because you are forcing yourself to retrieve the form from memory, which is exactly what you need to do on the test.
This is part of the reason why flashcards work so well for learning Chinese characters! A flashcard forces you to actively recall the information contained on the back of the card, prompted by the information on the front.
Once you are relying on active recall to review characters rather than copying them, the next question is when to make those retrieval attempts.
Space your reviews over time, but don’t rely on an algorithm
Spaced repetition is the best way to remember Chinese characters, but that doesn’t mean you should trust the scheduling algorithm in an app. The issue is that these apps provide a long-term solution for a long-term problem, but your specific dictation problem is short-term. In short, you can trust these apps to teach you characters over months and years, but not over days and weeks.
You don’t need a fancy algorithm to schedule your reviews, just don’t write the same character over and over; insert longer pauses between reviews. Once you can produce it, move on to something else and come back later.
A dictation test next week is one of the cases where some cramming makes sense, even though you should still spread repetitions within the time you have. I’ve written more about cramming versus spaced repetition here.
Cramming vs. spaced repetition: When to use which method to learn Chinese
Do at least one full simulated test before the real test
At least once before the real test, go through every item you are required to know how to write. Do this early enough that you have time to fix any problems the simulated test reveals.
Set up your simulated test as follows:
- Use audio prompts. This is perhaps the most important point, because audio is part of the dictation test but not of most people’s standard vocabulary practice. You can create audio flashcards in Anki for free. You can also ask an AI chatbot to generate sentences in the same format your teacher uses.
- Randomise the order if possible. You want to know whether you can write each item from the prompt, not only when it follows another item. The brain is pretty good at using clues to recall things, including clues that won’t be available on the real test.
- Answer and grade your answers the same way as on the test. If you are only required to write individual words, do that. If you are required to include Pinyin, include it. Judge your preparedness based on how you would have scored on the real exam.
- Make the practice environment match the test situation. If you will sit at a desk with pencil and paper for ten minutes, practise that way at least some of the time; if particular tools are allowed, use those tools. Research on context-dependent memory suggests that matching the learning and retrieval environments can improve recall, although the effect varies (Smith & Vela, 2001; Yüvrük, 2026).
Free and easy audio flashcards for Chinese dictation practice with Anki
This check will usually reveal some characters that remain unstable. These deserve extra attention, so don’t count on more reviews fixing them for you (although that can happen).
Use stronger memory techniques for characters that refuse to stick
Some characters are easy to remember once you understand them and retrieve them a few times. Some aren’t.
If you keep getting the same characters wrong over and over, use mnemonics or memory techniques. Mnemonics are particularly useful because they give you an extra route back to the character structure when you forget how to write something.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to discuss mnemonics in detail, but I’ve written more about how you can train your memory here and how to use mnemonics here. I suggest you read the two articles (or listen to the podcast episodes) in that order.
Remembering is a skill you can learn: Mnemonics for Chinese learners
You can increase your exposure to tricky characters. Put them on Post-it notes, your phone’s lock screen or write them on the backs of your hands. The point isn’t simply to look at the character and think, “I know that one.” Use each exposure to go through what you know about its structure: which components it contains, what they do and how they fit together.
Beyond the 听写/聽寫 (tīngxiě)
Everything discussed so far is meant to help you get through a specific test. If you also want to retain the knowledge long-term, you’ll also need other strategies. This is, as the heading implies, beyond the scope of this article, so I apologise in advance for the excessive link dropping.
To begin with, spaced repetition software is your friend. To learn more, start with Spaced repetition software and why you should use it and, specifically for characters, Why spaced repetition software is uniquely well suited to learning Chinese characters.
Spaced repetition software: What it is and how to use it to learn Chinese
As you learn more characters, you will realise that the real challenge with expanding your vocabulary in Chinese is not to learn new words, but to keep them all distinct in your mind. This also requires a different approach, in which mnemonics become more important. You really can’t learn Chinese characters by rote.
Learning to write thousands of characters is doable as an adult, but it takes much more time than is reasonable for most students. You need a very good reason to do so. If you want my take on learning handwriting without letting it take up too much time, see A minimum-effort approach to writing Chinese characters by hand.
Conclusion: Nailing dictation tests, 听写/聽寫 (tīngxiě), is not hard
To succeed at dictation, you need to understand what you hear, know which characters belong to the word and be able to write them from memory. For most learners preparing for ordinary vocabulary dictation, the last part is the difficult one.
Understand new characters before trying to memorise them, stop looking at the model once you start reviewing, spread your retrieval attempts over time, test the whole set before the exam and practise from audio in the format you will actually be tested on.
This method can get you to 100% if that’s what you want. Whether 100% is worth the time is a separate question. Aim for the result that makes sense given your course requirements and how much you personally care about handwriting, then spend the rest of your Chinese-learning time where it will do the most good.
References and further reading
Smith, S. M., & Vela, E. (2001). Environmental context-dependent memory: A review and meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(2), 203–220.
Yüvrük, E. (2026). Context brings back all the memories: A review of the physical context reinstatement effect on episodic memory. Cognitive Processing. Advance online publication.
